The Sword in the Stone
The portal let you out in the dark, under the inn, where you started.
Ten days had passed on the surface. You had no way to know that until you came back up — no sun underground, no calendar in the Shadowfell. But the world had moved on without you, and when you finally climbed through the tunnels and into the air, Leilon told you about it.
The Toke Inn was a shell being rebuilt. Rhovan gave you rooms and didn't charge. The tunnels below had acquired residents — a small clutch of wererats who knew your names and thanked you for clearing the place, and who had been quietly helping themselves to the belongings of people who no longer came home. You told them to be careful. They said they would be.
In the morning you went to see the mayor.
Angus Silvervein — dwarf, gray at the temples, the weight of an emptying town behind his eyes — told you what a caravan had brought through ten days ago: Mythrades had been executed in Yartar. He admitted to everything.
You found this less satisfying than you'd expected.
He told you the Knights of Vindictus chapter from Leilon hadn't returned. He told you Sir Titus hadn't been seen. He sent a raven north. Then he said, in case you hadn't noticed, there was still a very large devil pinned to the tower in the center of town, and that he had been attempting to work around it, but.
Mazros still hung in the stone.
The wound in his chest had never healed. It never would — the sword had been there too long and the binding was too deep. His head was low when Moist walked up to him, and it rose slowly.
"I have not seen you in a while," he said. "Where is the one that is putting me here?"
Moist told him Sir Titus went home. Probably wasn't coming back soon.
The devil looked around at the empty square, the missing moonbeam it had taken him some time to realize was his own torment, the ten days of silent stone.
"Are you not tired of this?" Moist asked.
"Yes," he said.
Moist explained the spell. Banishment: a minute of concentration, a willing acceptance, and Mazros would go home. Not destroyed. Not imprisoned worse. Just — home. Mazros asked how he could trust that. Moist pointed out that if he wanted to do something malicious, he could have simply cast it while the devil was pinned, without bothering to explain.
Mazros considered this.
He said: "Your kind shouldn't be on this plane. Send me back."
He rolled the save. He chose not to resist.
A minute passed. Then, "with a faint popping noise," the devil was gone.
The beam of light went with him.
The sword stayed.
It was still lodged in the stone where it had pinned Mazros for weeks — Sir Titus's blade, the same one he'd used to hold a nine-foot devil in place and then left behind when he flew north with a Nagpa in chains. The party worked it loose. The stone gave at fifteen.
KeYs reached out and touched the hilt.
For Sir Titus, this sword is a Holy Avenger — his order's pinnacle relic, the kind of weapon a paladin carries for decades. For KeYs, it is something else: a blade that will not suffer a devil or demon to stand while she holds it.
She took it.
You gave Mayor Silvervein the news. He looked at where the tower's crown had been lit for weeks. He said, "This is amazing."
You told him the ground was still tainted, that you couldn't consecrate it, that he probably shouldn't build anything there for a while.
He said he'd probably just burn it down.
"Burn it down seems like a good call," you agreed.
Audrey Spring Bloom was free of her cage.
She'd come out quietly, back when you crossed from the Shadowfell into a place warm enough to survive in without cold iron between her and the dark. She had been sleeping and eating goodberries and doing what she called "a lot of catching up." She looked better. She was alert. She had, it turned out, an enormous amount to say about dragons.
She'd written three books about them. They were very small books, being pixie-sized, but full-scale illustrations, extensive sourcing, and she had lost them all because an evil tiger-faced wizard had imprisoned her, stripped her library, and sold her into the Shadowfell markets for a price she didn't know and a reason she was still working out.
She wanted revenge. You put it on the list.
What she told you first was this: there are two black dragons in the Mire of Dead Men. They are known collectively as the Black Death. Their true names are Varagamanthir and Werverender — brother and sister — and they have spent decades presenting themselves as one creature in all dealings, appearing in two places at once, letting the legend grow until it became singular and enormous. There are twice as many sightings as there should be because there are twice as many dragons.
She knew where the Temple of Orcus was: in that same mire.
She knew something else. A pixie friend of hers — back home, in the Feywild, unreachable currently — had once been summoned to a different world, where a whole race of dragon-kin were enslaved and building a great temple under the hands of masters they could not overthrow. There was a prophecy among them. A platinum-colored dragon, born from an egg, would come and ignite the revolution.
"The egg that hatches a platinum dragon," Audrey said, "is the signal."
The party looked at Falkor.
Audrey said she didn't know for certain. She was speculating. But the egg had appeared out of nowhere, dropped into a well in a Sword Coast inn, hatched into something miraculous. Her friend knew more. Her friend was currently in the Feywild.
You told Audrey you would find her a way home.
You spent a week in Leilon.
Moist took a chisel made of magic to the collapsed section of the mine tunnels — Stone Shape, five feet a day, the old passage that caved in during the bug-swarm. By the end of the week he'd cleared thirty-five feet. The passage wasn't done. He kept going.
The rest of you helped Mayor Silvervein sort out the mess of an emptied town: which houses were salvageable, which were gone, which families had made it back and which hadn't. The wererats stayed below. The tower stayed empty.
The raven hadn't returned.
You packed for the Mire.
Next session: two black dragons know this swamp better than anyone alive, and somewhere in it is the temple where an angel waits.